Posts Tagged ‘careers’

When Elon University Professor Sirena Hargrove-Leak got her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of South Carolina in 2003, she didn’t know that she would become a sort of poster-child for women’s success in STEM careers.

Nonetheless, she did make her mark by becoming the first black-female to get an advance degree in chemical engineering from the University of South Carolina.

While this is certainly a milestone worth celebrating, the number of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, or STEM, fields is still very low.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Commerce reported the number of women in STEM careers, areas that are projected to have major growth, was only 24 percent.

But Hargrove-Leak thinks that even with that low number, there has been small progress in involving young women in STEM classes in schools.

“I remember teaching my first introduction to engineering class at Elon and I only had one female student,” she said.

Last spring, when Hargrove-Leak taught a freshman engineering class, there were eight females in the class.

“It’s interesting because here, it’s completely against the Elon ratio in the engineering classes,” Hargrove-Leak said. “Here, there are more males than females.”

But for Junior Danielle Cooke, who is majoring in biomedical engineering, the male to female ratio in the engineering school doesn’t bother her anymore.

“At first, I was super intimidated because I expected it to be all girls,” Cooke said. “But in my engineering classes, I’ve had the same group of guys for the three years, so we all know each other.”

While she is the only girl, or the minority, in most of her classes, Cooke said she’s never felt pressure to go out of her way to prove herself because she’s a girl. In fact, Cooke thinks being a woman in this field is actually advantageous.

“I think women offer a different perspective, and that makes the work environment a better place,” she said.

And senior Bio-Statistics major Kimi Peterson said that it makes sense for women to be in STEM classes because they’ve already got the skills.

“Girls are suited to work in science fields, because the field requires people who are organized and more prepared,” Peterson said. “Women usually have those traits.”

According to an article Paul Blundin from EduGuide, girl’s brains tend to be wired to do many things differently from boys when it comes to drawing conclusions, being productive, even handling boredom.

But if girls tend to have traits that would help them be successful in STEM careers, then why aren’t there more females in those fields?

And Professor of Statistics at Elon Ayesha Delpish says that that’s OK.

“I am a big proponent of women doing whatever they want to do,” Delpish said. “I think that women should do whatever they want to. What I am against is the saying that ‘Oh, you’re a girl and you can’t do that.’”

Initially, Delpish said she was not interested in math and hadn’t thought of a career in math.

“My interest growing up was English,” she said. “English anything. I never paid attention to math, until I didn’t do well on a quiz in math and my teacher said, ‘That’s OK, don’t worry. You have English.’”

It wasn’t until Delpish’s teacher brushed off her low score that she felt challenged to prove that she could be good at math.

“He said it was OK that I didn’t do well, and I wasn’t OK with that, ” she said.

While Delpish felt the push to succeed from that encounter with her teacher, for some girls, the subtle discouragement is often enough to change girls minds from pursuing STEM careers.

Hargrove-Leak thinks this is where being pro-active can be most effective.

“We have to make sure we’re getting the message out [that girls are good at math] as often and as early as possible,” she said. “Most of the work has to be done well before they get to the university.”

That’s why Hargrove-Leak said she includes a service-learning component in her class where her Elon students go to local elementary schools to perform hands-on projects with the kids.

In this setting, where kids perform small experiments and design challenges, Hargrove-Leak said that there are just as many girls in these classes as boys.

And that is true for most classrooms in the country, even well into high school.